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9.6-beta-1 Released


Jason Carr

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17 hours ago, Jason Carr said:

Beta 7 is out now as well with a new way to include fonts in custom themes without having to create a custom DLL, or requiring the user to install them manually:

This was important, because all themes that are approved for including in the theme manager are not allowed to require the user to have to run through any manual installation steps.

Great additions @Jason Carr!

I have two questions as a theme developer:

1- The last line raised a few concerns for me, if the theme manager does not allow the user to have to run through any manual installations steps then does this mean we cannot use plugins in our themes since the user is required to manually unblock the .dll files when first time installing the theme. There are many themes that relies on plugins for it's main features to work so a quick clarification from you will help clear any confusion regarding the plugins part.

2- As a theme developer how to send my themes for approval on the theme manager? I believe BIGFLIX can be included in the theme manager for now as it doesn't use any fonts or plugins for that build. My other themes will follow suit hopefully.

 

Once again thank you for always striving to make LB/BB amazing day by day! 

Edited by SNAK3ATER
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12 minutes ago, SNAK3ATER said:

the user is required to manually unblock the .dll files when first time installing the theme.

If you unzip a theme with 7zip the .dll's are automatically unblocked, and as 7zip is included with Launchbox i assume that is what is used to unzip downloaded themes. As for the other concerns Jason will have to comment there. 

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Odd behaviour I've noticed recently - if I click on the + icon at the top of a game box to open up the image viewer, the first image displayed isn't the one which should be first - I have to scroll back through the images to get there. It seems to be kind of random which image opens up first. Ideally it should be the first image I think.

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9 hours ago, RULLUR said:

Same on my end..and I thank you for fixing it too @Jason Carr. Now to see if the glitch where Screenshots don't switch over to the next game title in BigBox if you use a video Background. Any chance on that getting fixed next?

Planning on taking a look at it here soon.

3 hours ago, SNAK3ATER said:

Great additions @Jason Carr!

I have two questions as a theme developer:

1- The last line raised a few concerns for me, if the theme manager does not allow the user to have to run through any manual installations steps then does this mean we cannot use plugins in our themes since the user is required to manually unblock the .dll files when first time installing the theme. There are many themes that relies on plugins for it's main features to work so a quick clarification from you will help clear any confusion regarding the plugins part.

2- As a theme developer how to send my themes for approval on the theme manager? I believe BIGFLIX can be included in the theme manager for now as it doesn't use any fonts or plugins for that build. My other themes will follow suit hopefully.

 

Once again thank you for always striving to make LB/BB amazing day by day! 

Per #1, the nice thing about the installer is that DLLs should no longer need to be unblocked, so you shouldn't have to worry about that. Under normal circumstances, Windows only does that when files are downloaded directly from the browser and then extracted with the built-in zip utility.

Per #2, I will be announcing the theme uploader web form very soon (just later today). :)

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1 hour ago, Retrofrogg said:

Odd behaviour I've noticed recently - if I click on the + icon at the top of a game box to open up the image viewer, the first image displayed isn't the one which should be first - I have to scroll back through the images to get there. It seems to be kind of random which image opens up first. Ideally it should be the first image I think.

What it's supposed to do is jump to whatever image is being displayed on the game in the boxes view, and that one is not always first. Is it at least displaying the image that is displayed in the boxes view?

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On 3/19/2019 at 3:26 PM, Retrofrogg said:

No it's not doing that; for example, for the Arcade platform I have the image group set to 3D boxes, but when I press the image symbol it  generally opens a screenshort or something and I have to scroll back to the 3D box, which does always seem to be first in the list.

Okay, I'll add it to my list to try and replicate.

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Beta 10 is out now with the following:

  • Hopeful fix for videos in game startup themes not stopping audio when games start
  • Fixed an issue with horizontal wheels that I introduced in beta 9 (they were not scrolling properly)
  • Added a download acceleration-type-system for updates and theme downloads in the themes manager; got tired of crappy connections (*cough* Comcast) causing issues

Per the download accelerator stuff, it might seriously help update speeds, but you won't notice until the *next* update, and currently it's not yet implemented for background downloads. However, you can test the new system by downloading themes in Big Box, as those downloads all use the new download acceleration. Basically, what it does is divide up the downloads into a million different chunks, and instead of downloading the file all in one go, it downloads bits and pieces and retries up to 100 times if any of the pieces fail. It also threads the downloads so that multiple parts of the file are being downloaded at the same time. Hopefully it all works. ;)

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The file size of the preview images of the theme manager are ridiculously high, takes too much time to load some of them. There's no need for them to be full resolution png when a high quality jpeg would look the same but it will be dramatically smaller in size. They only fit a small portion of the screen yet some of them are 4K 6MB png images.

Is it be possible to optimize those images to make the navigation lightweight and faster?

Edited by Suhrvivor
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12 minutes ago, Chris Kant said:

is it also possible to have the theme downloader and startup screens loader available in LaunchBox? most of the time when I just configure things I use Launchbox and it would be more flowable not going to Bigbox only to prepare or update some things.

+1 on this idea?

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20 hours ago, Suhrvivor said:

The file size of the preview images of the theme manager are ridiculously high, takes too much time to load some of them. There's no need for them to be full resolution png when a high quality jpeg would look the same but it will be dramatically smaller in size. They only fit a small portion of the screen yet some of them are 4K 6MB png images.

Is it be possible to optimize those images to make the navigation lightweight and faster?

It's currently set up to use whatever images are uploaded by the theme creator. There are a few relic PNGs that I put in there early on that I need to replace with smaller JPEGs. The smaller JPEGs are only a couple hundred kilobytes, so it shouldn't really be an issue going forward.

18 hours ago, Drodrick said:

bibg box is giving me an error when I want to put an in platform filter

 

image.thumb.png.4d76808ccab635a58435fa72eed66dd1.png

Sadly the actual error is getting cut off in the screenshot here, so I can't really tell what the error is.

14 hours ago, Chris Kant said:

is it also possible to have the theme downloader and startup screens loader available in LaunchBox? most of the time when I just configure things I use Launchbox and it would be more flowable not going to Bigbox only to prepare or update some things.

Yes, this is planned for a later release. However, the LaunchBox theme manager/downloader will only work with LaunchBox and Startup themes. I don't plan to make a LaunchBox-based themes manager that controls Big Box themes.

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16 hours ago, Jason Carr said:

It's currently set up to use whatever images are uploaded by the theme creator. There are a few relic PNGs that I put in there early on that I need to replace with smaller JPEGs. The smaller JPEGs are only a couple hundred kilobytes, so it shouldn't really be an issue going forward.

Sadly the actual error is getting cut off in the screenshot here, so I can't really tell what the error is.

Yes, this is planned for a later release. However, the LaunchBox theme manager/downloader will only work with LaunchBox and Startup themes. I don't plan to make a LaunchBox-based themes manager that controls Big Box themes.

Thanks Jason, that error just appear when i try to apply a filter with my xbox 360 wireless controller, nevertheless if i try with the keyboard runs normal

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